Turkey’s new dirty war

When the AKP lost its majority in the June 2015 election, President Erdoğan tried to discredit the successful HDP, and win nationalist votes, by declaring war on Turkeys Kurds and ending the peace process with the PKK.

Sunlight flooded the main square of Silopi, a town in the southeast of Turkey, less than 15km from the borders with Iraq and Syria. Between December 2015 and January 2016, Turkish security forces heavily assaulted its 80,000 inhabitants, and fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is calling for democratic confederalism and demanding autonomy for areas with a Kurdish majority. The fighting was out of public view: Silopi, like other towns, was isolated for 37 days by curfews.

Throughout Turkey, including Istanbul and Ankara, the police are regularly targeted in attacks; this leads to greater suppression, which provokes reprisals. On 10 June the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a radical splinter group of the PKK, claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack on police in Istanbul. A few days earlier, the government had voted in a law lifting the immunity of some parliamentary members, to silence 59 MPs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

The atmosphere in Silopi back on that spring morning was tense. The regular appearance of police armoured vehicles, and the helicopter circling overhead, were a reminder that war was never far away. Queues formed in front of two public scribes who had set up their tables and typewriters. They had more work than usual, with people wanting a form filled in because their house had been destroyed, a letter to the prison director or a death certificate.

Riskyie Seflek, 60, lives in the middle of the combat zone. She said: ‘The tank behind the house was aiming for the mosque. But the shell went through the living room.’ Under her headscarf, which Kurdish women wear drawn back, she looked tired. We were in her garden with her husband, daughters and grandchildren. One of the boys had brought new clothes, which the family were inspecting. ‘They’re for Temer, my grandson,’ Seflek said. ‘He’s 16 and in jail. Before that, he was in hospital for three weeks after being shot in the hip.’ Temerwas not a militiaman; he (...)

(1) This Kurdish town in Syria was partially taken by ISIS in September 2014. It was retaken in January 2015 by Kurdish forces.

(2) Its editor Can Dündar was sentenced to almost six years prison, Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül to five years. Freed after three months by a Constitutional Court decision, they await their appeal trial.

(3) Its members included Mehmet Ali Ağca, who shot at Pope Jean Paul II in 1981. The Grey Wolves are still active and seek political influence, sometimes through violence.

(4) Sebnem Korur Fincanci, head of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, who carried out the forensic examination of the basements, is now in jail for having been the editor for the day of the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Gundem.